I’m an easy mark for panhandlers. One time, when visiting a friend in Chicago, I was waiting to meet her on a street corner when a single, fairly respectable hobo came up and asked for a dollar for some booze. This is the sort of honesty that speaks to me in a bum, so I gave it to him. Five minutes later, I was throwing all my bills into the air and weeping in despair as a cloud of homeless people swarmed about me, snatching the fluttering green pieces of paper from the air and shouting for more.